Ever since Viv shrunk, life became exponentially harder for her. It’s difficult enough being a female graduate student in a STEM program. She could still make some progress on her studies, but her work as a teaching assistant suffered immensely. She just no longer commanded the attention and respect she was supposed to command from the freshmen and sophomores. She’d be standing there, tiny, on top of her desk, speaking into a microphone and trying to walk people through some recitation slides and quizzes, but a lot of the time everyone just kind of… ignored her. It was tough trying to explain that to the professor she was working with.
Her roommates still cared for her, and the university was pretty quick on integrating means for tinies to move around the campus - like elevators and safe lanes. This helped to a point, but overall her outlook on the world around her changed correspondingly to her new height. Her self-esteem suffered in the process as she tried to place her new insignificant self in the big, dangerous reality. Troubles with asserting her authority in the classroom certainly didn’t help. On a good day, she was simply spoken over like she wasn’t there; on a bad one, someone openly belittled her. Like Trevor.
Oh, he was the worst - he might have been a freshman five years her junior, but he didn’t hold back at all… He seemed to have lost all respect for Vivienne ever since she dwindled. He mocked her openly and would often do something physically intimidating - like, pass too close to her table to knock into it and get her to lose her balance from the shaking. Or, he’d drop something on top of it next to her. “Shrunken women shouldn’t be teaching”, she heard multiple times from him as he looked down at her with a disdainful expression on his face. His tone was invariably condescending. “You should be doing something else. Dancing, maybe”.
His eyes said something else; his eyes left her no doubt that, if he could, he’d do something to her.
The worst part was that she found herself musing about that something far more often than she’d like.
In the campus library, Vivienne had a study spot of her own. It was assigned to her - and only to her - to serve as a temporary office. That all happened before she shrunk, so, naturally, the desk was full-size. And the library was really slow on installing a ladder for her to climb on top of it. She still used the space from time to time, but usually stayed under the table, on the floor, where she organized a bit of a miniature workspace. It was nice and quiet here.
Or, at least, it was supposed to be that way before Trevor decided to invade the space.
Perhaps he thought it would make a good study room - and assumed she wasn’t using it anymore. Perhaps he used it as a way of getting at her. Did he even suspect she was still coming here? Vivienne wasn’t sure. In any case, one day he walked in, all six feet of him, and settled into her former chair.
She observed all that from under the desk, and, naturally, when he sat down and moved in and got to work she ended up close to his sneaker- clad feet. The massive shoes immediately filled the area with a smell of rubber and cloth. He tapped his left foot in place to a rhythm she didn’t know. His feet were huge compared to her and she moved a bit away, suddenly afraid.
But there was more to it… something carnal awoke within her. She thought of this young man, who has expressed on so many occasions his disdain for her. She thought of his satisfied smirk and the cruel smile which played on his lips so often. She looked at the feet and legs which invaded her underdesk space; massive, no, titanic, uncaring.
She hated herself for the thought, but she found herself excited. Struck with a strange yearning. Trevor, all-mighty, confident, cold and attractive, with his abrasive demeanor… and she, down here, at his feet, unnoticed, forgotten.